St. Louis Art Capsules

Jessica Baran encapsulates the St. Louis arts scene

Newly ReviewedMaterial Studies There's something mildly apocalyptic about these hybrid fiber pieces. The six locally based artists included in this group exhibition maintain the bare minimum of the craft — a stitch-line or a pattern — then veer into their own realms of interest, seemingly all of a fatalistic bent. Christine Holtz's space helmet, gloves and boots are crafted from crushed Styrofoam peanuts; the resulting piece is aptly titled I Gotta Get Out of This Place. In Jessica May's Au, the smallest varieties of road kill — or their mangled fragments — are collected and placed in glass globes, their curled claws or gnarled wings tipped in gold. On the floor of the gallery, Jessica Witte has hand-styled a perfect doily pattern out of bird seed; the idea of it being devoured by birds is both elegant and a bit ominous. It's impossible to guess whether these artists realized that their collective way of making the homespun craft contemporary somehow also portends the medium's end, but it lends the medium — and the work — a fresh edge and a soupçon of irony, too. Through September 26 at Good Citizen Gallery, 2247 Gravois Avenue; 314-348-4587 or www.goodcitizenstl.com. Hours: noon-5 p.m. Wed., Fri. and Sat., and by appointment.

Tom Huck and the Rebellious Tradition of Printmaking Reviewed in this issue.

OngoingAnsel Adams in Yosemite Ansel Adams' photographs of Yosemite National Park long ago became the ubiquitous stuff of classic Americana — appearing so commonly on greeting cards, posters, postage stamps and calendars that it seems strange to encounter them in an art museum. Collectively, Adams' depictions of the American West became the icon for our notion of Mighty Wilderness around the time that Hollywood generated a similar myth via the Western. Reality, in short, is not often memorable. Looking at Adams' work as art takes a little effort, peeling back the layers of their less-sublime resemblance to cheap reproductions — or, perhaps more sublimely, to languorous landscape pans in John Ford films. But make the investment and you'll be rewarded: The real work holds up. You have to peer deeply into these pieces — as though through Adams' camera lens itself — framing minute-seeming valleys of trees, dwarfed beneath massive cloud-covered mountains. In the low light of the museum, the experience of looking at these images compels an almost voyeuristic awe at all things natural — that these exquisitely perfect photographs are, possibly, some of the closest things to nature we can readily know. Through September 20 at the Saint Louis Art Museum, 1 Fine Arts Drive (in Forest Park); 314-721-0072 or www.slam.org. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sun. (open till 9 p.m. Fri.).

Exposure 12: Implied Narratives: Paintings by Jamie Adams, Bill Kreplin and Kit Keith For this year's installment of the annual "Exposure" series, which typically highlights new and notable St. Louis-area artists, curator Terry Suhre selected three mid-career painters to display their current work. The resulting exhibition is a mature exploration of figuration and personal narratives, as channeled through familiar pop-cultural tropes. Jamie Adams merges Mannerism with French New Wave cinema in a series of complexly composed black-and-white paintings that fetishize Godard's coolly tragic Breathless star, Jean Seberg. Bill Kreplin reinvokes prototypical McCarthy-era suburbia embroiled in suggestively code-deviant scenarios in line drawings with sparing decorative patterns and brush-painted color. Kit Keith paints and repaints a round, dark-haired female face over maps, a page from a petty-cash log and other found antique ephemera in a way that suggests that even the subtlest side glances and twists of mouth are betraying. While each artist is making a project of playing with iconic sources and their respective freight of associations, the exhibit is refreshing for its skilled directness, appealing to our most fundamental ways of discerning meaning in one another: through stories, facial expressions, the movements of the body. Also showing: In a new gallery devoted to video art, the piece Phosphorescence, by Oakland-based artist Anthony Discenza, turns televisual images into lilting ambient abstractions. Through October 10 at Gallery 210, Telecommunity Center, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 1 University Boulevard (at Natural Bridge Road); 314-516-5976 or www.umsl.edu/~gallery. Gallery hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat.

Ideal (Dis-)Placements: Old Masters at the Pulitzer This exhibition of canonical canvases of slain martyrs, pious virgins and other grand dilemmas borrowed from two encyclopedic museums and replaced in naturally lit contemporary galleries is a reaffirmation of the human scale. The minimalism of Tadao Ando's building design is diffused by ornate, gilt-framed compositions that date from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, the two historical extremes meeting precisely at the fragile effects of daylight on the predominantly figural pieces. Contemplative and reverent, the show fulfills its premise so well that it seems capable of providing a discretely intimate experience for each and every viewer. Through October 3 at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, 3716 Washington Boulevard; 314-754-1850 or www.pulitzerarts.org. Hours: noon-5 p.m. Wed., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat.

Relics of a Glorious Past: Imperial Russian Artifacts from the Collection of Dr. James F. Cooper This assemblage of orthodox icons and the daily stuff of royalty forms a two-part essay on lost cultural splendor and the bygone transcendent art object. Framed in gilt halos, pounded metal and semiprecious stones, the small tempera-on-wood devotional paintings exemplify an anonymous milieu in which studied replication was prized over innovation, and communion with the immaterial was the subject matter of choice. Similarly, the gold-rimmed teaspoons, military regalia and assorted decorative pieces from the show's secular portion involve such an engaged level of tactile detail that they could be considered devotionally crafted. The exhibit as a whole serves as a useful reference point for contemporary art's renewed interest in gold, which seems to signify a nostalgia for creative acts deemed sacred and authentic. Through December 20 at the Saint Louis University Museum of Art, 3663 Lindell Boulevard; 314-977-2666 or sluma.slu.edu. Hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Wed.-Sun.